Anonymous launches massive cyber assault on Israel

Hacktivist group Anonymous has launched a second massive cyber-attack against Israel, dubbed #OpIsrael. While the hackers claim to have caused multi-billion dollar damage, Israel declares there haven’t been any major disruptions.

Anonymous threatened to "disrupt and erase Israel from
cyberspace" in protest over its mistreatment of
Palestinians.

Dozens of Israeli websites were unavailable as of early Sunday,
with one of the latest being the Israeli Ministry of Defense online
page, according to Anonymous on Twitter.

However, the country's officials indicated that the disruptions
haven't been serious.

The Israel Police website had difficulties loading for only a
short time before going back to normal. The same went for the
Defense Ministry page, which was hacked for a few hours, and then
restored.

Anonymous pointed out on Saturday night that they had shut down
several government sites, including those of the Prime Minister's
Office, the Israel Securities Authority, the Immigrant Absorption
Ministry and the Central Bureau of Statistics, but the government
denied the claim, Haaretz reported.

The hackers also released a list of email addresses and credit
card numbers, reportedly lifted from the online catalog of Israel
Military, a privately-owned business that sells military surplus,
Haaretz reported. Israel Military officials indicated that the
information made public did not come from its site.

Yitzhak Ben Yisrael of the government's National Cyber Bureau
told AP that hackers had mostly failed to shut down key
sites.

"So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real
damage," Ben Yisrael indicated. "Anonymous doesn't have the
skills to damage the country's vital infrastructure. And if that
was its intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack of
time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are
close to its heart.”

Anonymous, however, claimed that more than a hundred thousand
websites have been brought down since the start of OpIsrael, and
some 30,000 Israeli bank accounts hacked, saying the damage has
topped $3 billion.

Israel responded to mass cyber-attacks on Sunday by launching a
series of raids in which several Palestinian activists were
arrested, President Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor for communications and
information technology Sabri Saydam told WAFA.

Nothing indicates that the Palestinians have anything to do with
the hacking of Israeli sites, Saydam added, calling it “a
cyberspace battle” and stressing that the Internet “is open
to all.”

@phr0zenm @op_israel as we do know at
least 3 hackers are arrested last night in Gaza , nothing official
but source is GazaHackersTeam .

"God bless the minds and the efforts of the soldiers of the
electronic battle," Ihab Al- Ghussian, Gaza's chief government
spokesman, wrote on his official Facebook page, AP
reported.

A message from a Twitter account linked to Anonymous said
Israeli Defense Forces troops were arresting suspected hackers, a
report the IDF spokesman also denied, according to Haaretz.

In a video message posted on YouTube, Anonymous said that on
April 7, “elite cyber-squadrons from around the world have
decided to unite in solidarity with the Palestinian people against
Israel as one entity to disrupt and erase Israel from
cyberspace.”

Addressing the Israeli government, the group stated: “You
have NOT stopped your endless human right violations. You have NOT
stopped illegal settlements. You have NOT respected the ceasefire.
You have shown that you do NOT respect international law.”

Israeli hackers have reportedly prepared an answer to the
Anonymous cyber attack, penetrating the website associated with the
campaign against Israel - opisrael.com. Instead of reading about
Anonymous' anti-Israel views, those visiting the page on Sunday
morning were instead presented with a pro-Israel banner and a long
list of facts regarding the legitimacy of Israel and the history of
the Jewish people, according to Israel Today.

A short audio message distributed by the Israeli hackers called
those taking part in OpIsrael “weak” and
“feeble-minded,” and threatened that “for every action
they take, ours will hurt two dozen more.”

Earlier on Saturday, an Anonymous affiliated group identifying
itself as The N4m3le55 cr3w announced that they “have gathered
600 websites and 100 plus servers we will be attacking”
throughout Israel. The list includes banks, schools, businesses and
a host of prominent government websites. “That is just our
targets,” the group warned.

“We cannot speak on what the rest of Anonymous will be
attacking but we can guarantee it will be in the 1000′s.”

The massive cyber attack falls on the eve of Holocaust Memorial
Day. Anonymous has accused the Israeli government of mistreating
its own citizens, violating treaties, attacking its neighbors,
threatening to shut down the Internet in Gaza and ignoring
“repeated warnings” about human rights abuses.

On Friday, Israeli radio reported that scores of large
organizations had closed their websites to shield them from hacker
attacks.

Before the attack began, Lior Tabansky, a fellow at the Yuval
Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security of Tel Aviv
University, told the Times of Israel that distributed denial of
service (DDos) attacks, which work by overwhelming targeted servers
with traffic which stems from multiple systems, are the only tool
at the hackers’ disposal.

"Unless they have names and passwords, [DDoS] is really their
only attack strategy. Unfortunately, there is little a company can
do to stop it, but it is not the major cyber-threat many people,
especially in the media, believe it to be. It's more of an
annoyance, and if they do manage to intimidate sites into
submission, the victory will be one of public relations."

According to a former MI5 agent Annie Machon, actions such as
#OpIsrael are “a new front in protest” against the clampdown
on rights and freedoms by certain states.

“If you can do it over cyberspace, you get global awareness
of what you’re doing, and the message you’re trying to put out. And
this is precisely what Anonymous has achieved, with this publicized
assault against certain Israeli websites,” Machon told RT.

Unlike real cyber-terrorists, “they’re not trying to steal
anyone’s information, they’re not trying to get your bank details
or anything like that. What they’re just trying to do is make the
websites of certain governments and big organizations crash, so
that people can be aware that there is an issue here that needs to
be addressed,” the former MI5 agent added.

“This latest attack is not as serious as it looked in the
media,” believes Dr Tal Pavel, founder and CEO of
middleeasternet.com. For a start, there were not too many attacks
against Israeli websites – private, governmental or belonging to
organizations, he told RT. Secondly, there is an issue of the
“quality” of these attacks. “Even though several websites
were hacked or defaced, no information has been leaked, no damage
has been done to the core system or infrastructure of the Israeli
major websites,” Pavel added.

As for the effectiveness of the Anonymous’ cyber-attack, it does
get media attention. However, in expert’s view, the damage caused
by the action “is not exactly as planned.”

Anonymous launched the first ‘OpIsrael’ cyber-attacks in
November 2012 during Operation Pillar of Defense, an eight day
Israeli Defense Force (IDF) incursion into the Gaza s trip.

Some 700 Israeli website suffered repeated DDos attacks, which
targeted high-profile government systems such as the Foreign
Ministry, the Bank of Jerusalem, the Israeli Defence Ministry, the
IDF blog, and the Israeli President's official website.

The Israeli Finance Ministry reported an estimated 44 million
unique attacks on government websites over a four day period.